Breaths
by nothing-rhymes-with-ianto
Summary: For the prompt: "Brian's favorite pastime was making sure Justin was still breathing."


Brian's favorite pastime was making sure Justin was still breathing.

In the beginning, after the bashing, Brian would be awakening by Justin's little whimpers, the thrashing of his head back and forth as the nightmares bashed around in his skull. Usually he would manage to wake him before the screams began, and he'd just sit there with his hand on Justin's shoulder or neck, waiting until Justin reached for him to hold him and kiss his neck and whisper nonsense. Justin would drift back to sleep and Brian would lay awake for a long time, ignoring the fact that his arm was asleep because Justin was sleeping on it, listening to the gentle inhale, exhale wheeze of Justin's breaths as he slept, the sound an assurance that he was alive.

Once the nightmares had died down, Justin slept like a fucking log. Nothing, short of a party horn, could wake him in the middle of the night. But Brian had still found himself waking at 2 AM, 4 AM, and just listening to Justin's breathing, his hand resting gently on the pale neck, a pulse beating reassuringly beneath his fingers. He'd sit for a moment and watch Justin's eyelids moving as he dreamed, his chest rising and falling rhythmically. And Brian would breathe a sigh of relief and drift off to sleep to the steady beat.

When Justin was with Ethan, Brian thought maybe, for once, he'd get a decent night's sleep, no waking in the middle of the night any more. No more quiet 3 AMs swathed in blue and exhaustion. But he was wrong. Because he couldn't get to sleep when there was silence beside him. He hadn't expected that, but he couldn't sleep because he knew he'd wake up to silence, and that was what had scared the shit out of him for the better part of a year, and he dreaded it. So he took a sleeping pill instead, knocking himself out because he knew, he knew that if he woke up to silence, he might do something drastic.

After the cancer, they both stayed awake. They would wake and fall asleep at intervals. Justin would wake with Brian's hand on his neck, or in his hair, and snuggl up to him, holding him close. In the privacy and intimacy of darkness and Brian and home, he'd let his worried and relieved tears fall. Brian would wake with Justin's head on his chest, ear over his heart and a wetness on his solar plexus. He'd snake his hand around and place it on Justin's chest, feeling the beating of his heart and the rise and fall of his breathing. And he couldn't sleep for a while, laying awake and thanking whatever-the-fuck was out there for making him choose to stay. And then he would fall asleep to the whoosh of Justin's breathing, the soft murmur of his dreams.

The bomb took a lot out of them both. Brian would often lay awake at night, lost in the rough sound of Justin breathing beside him. He'd think of the harsh breaths of that night, the terrified whisper in which he'd told Justin the truth, the whole truth, for the first time. He had been so scared, so scared that he would never hear Justin breathing again, that his fears had come horribly, irrevocably true. He hooked a leg over Justin's and pulled him closer, kissing the top of his head and comforted by the feeling of Justin's breath ghosting across his collarbone.

The night Justin left, Brian was restless, breathing harshly, trying not to let the tears fall. He knew in his heart, somewhere, that he would know if Justin ever stopped breathing, but he still felt frightened. He buried his head in Justin's neck, the blonde's breathing almost overwhelmed by his own harsh sobs. He savored the breaths pushing past his ear, puffs of warm ghosting mournfully across for the last time. He knew it wasn't going to change anything, but he was so terrified of living in silence. His own breathing had become less important than Justin's. Justin's breaths were what allowed him to stop and breathe freely. He clung to the sounds and sensations of air being pulled and released from Justin's lungs, hanging on to the fact that four years ago, the breaths hadn't stopped, and four years later, he was still there, breathing.


End file.
